Lederer on "bloopers"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

Richard Lederer, filling in for William Safire, writes about "bloopers" in
Sunday's "On Language":

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/magazine/24ONLANGUAGE.html
Why do we all delight so in bloopers? One clue may come from the origin of
the word itself. _Blooper_ first appeared in American English in the
mid-1920's as a description of a wounded fly ball looped past the reach of
the infielders. Almost at the same time, the verb to _bloop_ began to mean
operating a radio set in such a way that it emitted howls and whistles,
perhaps an echo of our reactions to physical or verbal howlers. About a
decade later, the nouns _bloop_ and _blooper_ came to signify pratfalls of
the body and tongue.
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A minor blooper: based on Proquest and N-archive, the radio usage of
_bloop(er)_ slightly predates the baseball usage (1924 vs. 1925). Or are
there other sources antedating these?

See: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0412D&L=ADS-L&P=R34


--Ben Zimmer